This blog continues the discussion that we began with Epic Journey: The 2008 Elections and American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).The latest book in this series is Defying the Odds: the 2016 Elections and American Politics.

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Defying the Odds

New book about the 2016 election.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Panic

The Republican Party was in turmoil again Wednesday as party leaders, strategists and donors voiced increasing alarm about the flailing state of Donald Trump’s candidacy and fears that the presidential nominee was damaging the party with an extraordinary week of self-inflicted mistakes, gratuitous attacks and missed opportunities

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Trump has failed to take advantage of Friday’s report showing slow economic growth in the last quarter or on an interview Clinton gave to Fox’s Chris Wallace on Sunday in which she said that FBI Director James B. Comey had generally agreed with her characterizations of the use of a private email server as secretary of state. The interview has drawn criticism from news organization fact checkers.

“Donald Trump can still win this thing, but not on the current trajectory that he’s on, and that’s really up to him,” said [MS RNC member Henry] Barbour. “At some point, he needs to be immeasurably better than Hillary Clinton, but he’s not going to have an opportunity to govern if he doesn’t begin to bring Republicans together and then, eventually, bring independents and even Democrats on board and convince them that he can do this job.”

Barbour said he, like others, has been frustrated at missed opportunities since the Democratic convention ended Thursday night. “The last several days have made this election a referendum on Donald Trump. We want this to be a referendum on Hillary Clinton and the wrong direction the country’s on.”